This Blu-ray set brings together all the episodes from the 1955-56 season, which were in syndication for decades. I hadn't seen the show in a long time, and it was fascinating to return to it.

The first thing that jumps out is that it's so much a New York statement that it's surprising it resonated all over America. The Kramdens live in what was called a railroad flat, of a kind that was all over Brooklyn in the 1950s and '60s - very like my parents' first apartment. And the show's perspective is specific to New York's boroughs, a sort of urban provincial.

Ralph is a blue-collar guy who drives a bus, and were it not for the inherent charm of Jackie Gleason, he'd be a pretty unpleasant figure. He is usually either angry, about to get angry or apologizing for being angry. Make no mistake - this is a frustrated, thwarted guy, with enormous aspirations that will never be fulfilled and a self-image looking for any excuse to expand itself into grandeur. But every time he finds what seems like a good excuse to think grandly of himself, it evaporates - e.g., a suitcase full of money turns out to be counterfeit.

No television show can survive, appeal intact, for almost 60 years, without complicated truths within its foundation. Ralph is like the working guys Gleason knew as he was growing up in Brooklyn, but he's also Gleason himself - or the man he could have been, if his talent hadn't rescued him. The show is the story of a couple who perhaps used to be happy, but aren't anymore, of people who used to be young and are now old before their time. (It's unimaginable that Ralph and Alice have any kind of sex life.)

The obligatory "baby-you're-the-greatest" endings notwithstanding, people recognized in the Kramdens, not their own joy, but their own discontent. (My mother once told me that she couldn't watch the show anymore because Ralph's yelling and screaming reminded her too much of my father.) Of course, the show was funny, but it found its humor in the hard truths of marriage and of borderline poverty - and also in the wonderful Art Carney, as Ed Norton, who, unlike Ralph, was too simple and sunny not to be happy with his place in life.

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Still, Ralph remains the arresting figure - the butt of the joke, and yet heroic, dreaming big and yet suppressing his dreams every morning so he can go to work each day. He's the old-young man we see in the Weegee photos, cooling off on the fire escape on some long-lost hot summer night at mid-century. Whatever became of him? Did he ever make it to Miami Beach, like Gleason did, and get a chance to feel like a big shot? Let's hope so. The Blu-ray is pristine. It looks fantastic - for 16 hours and 57 minutes.